Sweet Tooth
by Agent Yoko
Summary: Steven discovers that Byron likes sweets. Oneshot, straightforward, fluff, Adamantineshipping StevenxByron .


Christ, I haven't published anything since 2005. Well, here goes.

-x-

I'm not sure how I discovered it. I'm sure it was subtle, unlike everything else about Byron. But it fits, because our relationship began in a very slow, subtle way.

Two silly men who happen to bump into each other doing what we love most: digging holes in search of something. For him, it was fossils; for me, pretty stones.

Our meeting was pure chance. My search to expand my "dirt collection" (a term given by my father, though in an I-love-you-but-you're-wasting-your-life manner) brought me to Oreburgh City in the Sinnoh region. After speaking to the mine's foreman (at the time, I thought he looked quite inapt for his position- a bespectacled teenager? Ridiculous.), I was allowed to dig, as long as I didn't interfere with the workers. But I soon came to find that there was nothing accessible, except black coal that made my fingers black and itchy. As I left, I saw a rugged-looking man standing near the entrance: the shovel he held did not seem out of place but the ragged, billowing cape on his shoulders was a different story. Maybe it was the cape that made me notice him, maybe it was something else. Either way, I must have stopped in my tracks because he looked back at me. And he smiled.

I later came to find that he was in town for the day to check on his son (the scrawny foreman who doubles as the city's gym leader, as I learned). It was a rare occurrence for him to visit his hometown, and even rarer for him to come to the old mine. I was lucky. After our first meeting, we dated casually- part of that due to the distance between us. It drove me crazy, the hundreds of miles between Mossdeep and Canalave; it made me climb walls when I couldn't speak to him and left me sleepless with worry many nights that maybe whichever mine he visited that day had collapsed (for that very reason, I prefer caves).

"Don't worry, Steven. A mine isn't going to get me," he told me when I mentioned that I worried. But I couldn't be soothed so easily.

I treasured the time we had together. It was rare, and it seemed like time without Byron was time utterly wasted. And then one day, he asked me to move in with him (I thought it was a spontaneous romantic act until he told me that he had been planning it for months).

Considering I had always been a solitary individual (being the only child in the family will do that to you), living with another man was hard, even if he was my lover. But I found that despite the massive amounts of dirt he would bring home on days he went to mines, he was a very easy person to live with- I imagined it came from being a father.

But this new development puzzled me. He had never mentioned it; I had never asked. And maybe it was just my imagination, but I was certain that the carton of ice cream I now held in my hand was newer than the one I noticed yesterday. When I opened it, it was obvious that is _was_ new, though it was clear that several scoops had been extracted from the top.

As a child, I had never liked sweets. Even then, children with sticky mouths chasing after each other, fighting over more sweets, sickened me. To this day, I cannot stand the taste (or even sight) of anything that has been overly sweetened- this container of chocolate ice cream was no exception.

I marched from the kitchen to the living room of his gym-adjacent house in search of him. Though it was not more than ten feet away, I was able to ponder the other evidence of sweets I had seen in this house- candy wrappers in the garbage pail, sugary crumbs in his computer's keyboard, and small pieces of chocolate, light shining off their foil, at the back of the pantry.

I found him lounging on his old couch; head propped up on one of the worn arms, feet still in boots on the opposite arm and archaeology journal in hand.

"Byron…what is this?" I asked, holding the container.

He looked startled for a minute, no doubt confused by the distraught expression I wore. He glanced at the container in my hand, then to my puzzled face. Then he laughed. Stood up, walked to me, and ruffled my pale hair.

"What can I say, Steven? I have a sweet tooth," he chuckled. He kissed me and I tasted chocolate.

And for the first time in my life, I wanted more.

-x-

Yup. I'm dreadfully out of practice, but this idea struck me one night when I was making myself a root beer float and I felt compelled to write it. Byron is definitely the newest addition to my list of favorite gym leaders, along with Roark and Volkner, so I decided to take one of my new ships out for a sail.


End file.
